Most comparative datasets of Chinese varieties are not digital; however, Wiktionary includes a wealth of transcriptions of words from these varieties. The usefulness of these data is limited by the fact that they use a wide range of variety-specific romanizations, making data difficult to compare. The current work collects this data into a single constituent (IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet) and structured form (TSV) for use in comparative linguistics and Chinese NLP. At the time of writing, the dataset contains 67,943 entries across 8 varieties and Middle Chinese. The dataset is validated on a protoform reconstruction task using an encoder-decoder cross-attention architecture (Meloni et al 2021), achieving an accuracy of 54.11%, a PER (phoneme error rate) of 17.69%, and a FER (feature error rate) of 6.60%.

This paper describes a system attended in the SemEval-2018 Task 1 “Affect in tweets” that predicts emotional intensities. We use Group LSTM with an attention model and transfer learning with sentiment classification data as a source data (SemEval 2017 Task 4a). A transfer model structure consists of a source domain and a target domain. Additionally, we try a new dropout that is applied to LSTMs in the Group LSTM. Our system ranked 8th at the subtask 1a (emotion intensity regression). We also show various results with different architectures in the source, target and transfer models.